Sunday, February 5, 2012

As you may know, we have an automatic update checker in Aegisub, you may have noticed it telling you about the 2.1.9 release yesterday.

When we check for updates, we also send a little bit of anonymous system information back, to get an idea of what kind of systems Aegisub is being used on. This allows us to make some basic statistics. Here's a few facts:

In the past 35 hours, about 20,000 checks for updates have been made, in other words, Aegisub gets started more than 550 times an hour, or 13,500 times a day, worldwide. Of course, this only counts those who have automatic update checking enabled.

Those 20,000 checks have originated from slightly under 10,000 unique IP addresses, so the users covered seem to start Aegisub about 1.5 times a day.

Of those 10,000 users covered (we'll assume one IP address is one user), just below 2000 are running 2.1.9 now. There are still about 7500 2.1.8 users checked in, while 325 users are still stuck on 2.1.7... if you are one of those please tell why so we can fix the problem you have with more recent versions!

9700 users are on some Windows version, just below 100 on Mac OS X, and just below 70 on a Linux system. Sorry, with less than 2% of users on non-Windows systems those simply won't get as much attention.

More than 6500 users are on Windows 7, that's pretty cool. 2200 on Windows XP, 600 on Vista, almost 350 on some version Aegisub doesn't recognise (it could be Windows 8 Developer Preview, or maybe Wine), and then there's a few on 2003 Server, and two lone Windows 2000 users.

A little more than 1/3 of the IP addresses have checked in with a US English language operating system. We use the operating system language to gauge what language people prefer using their software in: The language you install your OS in is most likely the language you prefer to use all software in.Next is Spanish, with a little above 10% of the language count, then follows Russian and French. After that there is a steeper drop and follows is the "long tail", of which the top is Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Polish and Arabic (Saudi Arabia). The remaining languages all have less than 200 reports counted on them. If all Chinese languages were added together they would be on a fourth place, close behind Russian.

Lastly, if the last half million entries in the logs are counted, more than 165,000 unique IP addresses are seen, but then the time period covered (about 6 weeks) is probably too long for it to be reasonable to assume that one IP equals one user. However, it is likely that there are more than a hundred thousand Aegisub installations around the world. That's pretty good.

Q: Why all those delays?A: First it was blamed on laziness. Then, FFmpegSource 2.17 was getting incredibly close to release and it was thought it was best to wait for those. Then when that happened an older problem resurfaced, not having sufficient access to the servers. All of this was finally resolved yesterday.

Q: So what's new?A: Lots of stuff, although most of it is just bug fixes. See the changelog on the main site.

Q: I downloaded one of the release candidates, should I re-download?A: The very last release candidate put up (on January 24th) was used for the actual release. If you got an earlier one and didn't update it, you should re-download it. ffms2.dll should be 6.209.024 bytes.

Q: Where are the Linux binariesA: People actually used those? Those static binaries we offered for the 2.1.8 release were a bit of a hassle to use, and it turned out they weren't very flexible either. (In particular, because they were built with an older version of wxWidgets, all menu bars suddenly disappeared when they were run under Ubuntu with Unity.) If there is enough demand we might try to make some new ones available, but don't count on it. Ask your distribution's packagers to make some nice packages, it should be quite possible now.

Q: Why did you remove <insert language> dictionary from the installer?A: Because it was taking up space that could be saved, there's no sense in increasing everyone's download by 10 MB for getting 20 dictionaries most people will use at most 1 or 2 of. Therefore all dictionaries but US English spell-checker were removed from the main installer. All of the dictionaries previously included in the main installer have been made available as separate installers, so you can get just those you need. (Also, the dictionaries rarely changed between Aegisub versions so there wasn't much reason for upgraders to re-download those every time.)

Q: So these are really the final builds, right? No more changes?A: The Mac OS X package might get updated at some point! It was built rather long ago and there have surely been updates for various libraries (especially wxWidgets) since then, so it can use an update. When that happens, we will try to make sure the in-program update checker notices you about it.

Q: The Portable version should be a simple archive file, not an installer!A: It is. The Portable version is a RAR self-extracting archive, so use whatever archiver program you prefer to extract it if you don't like the GUI supplied or need to pull out single files or such.

Q: Is this bug-free now?A: Of course not, bug-free software is nearly impossible to make, but it's much better than previous versions. (In fact, we already have a couple of known bugs in 2.1.9.) A 2.1.10 version might happen at some point.

Q: I found a bug! How do I tell you guys about it?A: Come talk to us on IRC. Or on the forum. Or post it directly on the bug-tracker, but if you do that and it's not actually a bug, or is already known, we will ridicule you.

Please remember that the blog comments are not for asking for general help or reporting problems, you will most likely get ignored if you do that.

About Aegisub

Aegisub is an advanced subtitle editor for Windows, and UNIX-like systems, such as Linux, Mac OS X and BSD. It is open source software and free for any use.

Aegisub natively works with the Advanced SubStation Alpha format (aptly abbreviated ASS) which allows for many advanced effects in the subtitles, apart from just basic timed text. Aegisub's goal is to support using these advanced functions with ease.